The Mayor's Wife, by Anna Katharine Green

Chapter xix.

The Cry from the Stairs

I was alone in the library when Nixon returned. He must have seen Mrs. Packard go up before he left,
for he passed by without stopping, and the next moment I heard his foot on the stairs.

Some impulse made me step into the hall and cast a glance at his ascending figure. I could see only his back, but
there was something which I did not like in the curve of that back and the slide of his hand as it moved along the
stair-rail.

His was not an open nature at the best. I almost forgot the importance of his errand in watching the man himself.
Had he not been a servant — but he was, and an old and foolishly fussy one. I would not imagine follies, only I wished
I could follow him into Mrs. Packard’s presence.

His stay, however, was too short for much to have been gained thereby. Almost immediately he reappeared, shaking his
head and looking very much disturbed, and I was watching his pottering descent when he was startled, and I was
startled, by two cries which rang out simultaneously from above, one of pain and distress from the room he had just
left, and one expressive of the utmost glee from the lips of the baby whom the nursemaid was bringing down from the
upper hall.

Appalled by the anguish expressed in the mother’s cry, I was bounding up-stairs when my course was stopped by one of
the most poignant sights it has ever been my lot to witness. Mrs. Packard had heard her child’s laugh, and flying from
her room had met the little one on the threshold of her door and now, crying and sobbing, was kneeling with the child
in her arms in the open space at the top of the stairs. Her paroxysm of grief, wild and unconstrained as it was, gave
less hint of madness than of intolerable suffering.

Wondering at an abandonment which bespoke a grief too great for all further concealment, I glanced again at Nixon.
He had paused in the middle of the staircase and was looking back in a dubious way denoting hesitation. But as the full
force of the tragic scene above made itself felt in his slow mind, he showed a disposition to escape and tremblingly
continued his descent. He was nearly upon me when he caught my eye. A glare awoke in his, and seeing his right arm rise
threateningly, I thought he would certainly strike me. But he slid by without doing so.